by DailyDigest

Economy

The General Data Protection Regulation is a rule passed by the European Union in 2016, setting new rules for how companies manage and share personal data. In theory, the GDPR only applies to EU citizens’ data, but the global nature of the internet means that nearly every online service is affected, and the regulation has already resulted in significant changes for US users as companies scramble to adapt.

The first stop on my journey was Rugeley, a former colliery town of 24,000 people in the West Midlands. I had got a job via an employment agency at Amazon, and was subsequently put to work for ten-and-a-half hours a day, four days a week in one of the huge “fulfilment centres” that processed items sold by the world’s largest retailer. Everything at Amazon had a euphemism. We didn’t work in a warehouse and we were not employees; rather we were “associates” on temporary zero-hours contracts. You weren’t sacked at the end of nine months; you were “released”. We were pawns in an algorithmic system of management that was a throwback to the theories of Frederick Taylor, who believed in the scientific perfectibility of labour activity.

Friday’s protests – the fourth evening of demonstrations in a row – began after the release of a private autopsy that contradicted the official account of the police shooting.

On the night of 18 March, Clark was standing in his grandmother’s back yard holding only his iPhone when officers, who did not announce they were police, shouted at him to reveal his hands then fired before he could respond.

Neither Khan nor politically correct London police boss Cressida Dick — who recently appeared to deny any racial or religious element to grooming gangs and claimed they have “probably” been in Britain for “centuries and centuries and centuries” — seem willing to consider the contribution of mass migration and the accompanying breakdown in social cohesion to the crime wave, with Dick blaming the rising violence on “social media”.

Moreover, it appears that the MME has some real enforcement power coming out of the gate, something former environmental ministries lacked, often being stymied from acting or even bullied by deep-pocketed, politically powerful companies, including Chinese three state-run oil-majors.

The Army Corps of Engineers designed a $500,000 computer model that lets scientists simulate how floods affect the Upper Mississippi River, demonstrating, in part, the difference that larger levees make. The tests show that if the region faces a disaster as grave as the Great Flood of 1993, communities with higher levees — found in a handful of levee districts on both the Illinois and Missouri sides of the river — would be far better protected, and those without them would fare far worse. On the Illinois side, the land behind the Sny’s higher levees would be much drier, with some areas saved from more than 16 feet of flooding. The Missouri side would weather floodwaters up to 1.7 feet higher than it experienced in 1993.

Researchers already knew that recycled wastewater is safe for drinking — all that’s left is getting people like me who are grossed out on board with the concept. They conducted a blind taste test and gave 143 people samples of tap water, bottled water and recycled wastewater (researchers call it indirect potable reuse, or IDR). Participants ranked the water on taste, texture, smell, color and temperature and found that tap water ranked lower, while bottled water and recycled wastewater were equally liked. “The groundwater-based water was not as well liked as IDR or bottled water,” study co-author and UC Riverside professor Mary Gauvain said in a press release about the findings. “We think that happened because IDR and bottled water go through remarkably similar treatment processes, so they have low levels of the types of tastes people tend to dislike.”

Making over 6,000 measurements from several caves in Brazil, the researchers produced a record that goes back 85,000 years. In this area, the oxygen isotope signature of rainwater—which falls almost entirely during the summer monsoon season—changes as more and more rain falls. So later in a heavy monsoon season, or after several years of above-average rain, rainwater contains less oxygen-18 than it does in drier times.

Gold & Silver

Article suggestions for the Daily Digest can be sent to [email protected]. All suggestions are filtered by the Daily Digest team and preference is given to those that are in alignment with the message of the Crash Course and the "3 Es."